


not sacred even to the gods

by bazzystar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, M/M, Memory/Dreams, One Shot, oblique TSOA reference, tsoa - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 11:35:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7266541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bazzystar/pseuds/bazzystar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>What is he worth to you?</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	not sacred even to the gods

He thinks he dreamed it, afterwards. When he wakes up, in the tiny room with the radio playing, in a city he no longer recognizes, he thinks he dreamed it.

He was frozen, after all.

It couldn't have happened.

He forgets it then, willfully at first, tucking it away in the corner of his mind where he keeps the past. As the list of things he has lost grows longer he forgets it for real, by accident, by sheer overcrowding, the future putting new things in his mind every day. He has so little time for sorrow, except that's not quite right. He has so little time for _old_ sorrow, even if it is fresh to him, even if in his mind it's only been two months since the train. There is so much new sorrow, day after day after day, death and destruction and _no one's got polio anymore_ but he is so alone. The others can talk to him on a telephone so small that it fits in his ear and he is still alone. Always.

He moves away, leaves a few of the ghosts behind. The rest come with him.

He starts writing them down, thinking maybe it will clear some space in his head. What it does really is unlock more doors, leading him down twisting roads toward more ghosts.

At night he dreams of her, the tall woman with black eyes and black hair dripping down her back, the woman with the voice like rocks being crushed under a bootheel, the woman who spoke in a language he did not know and yet understood perfectly. She stands before him in the silent cathedral, bluewhite walls arching and meeting high above her. She says _I have not forgotten our bargain._ She laughs like icebergs cracking and he sees in her open mouth rows and rows of needle teeth.  

He wakes in a cold sweat.

He goes to the support group with Sam, talks when he's asked to. He says he has nightmares. Says he can't remember them. There's one day where he slips away, goes to the library, uses the computer. The internet. He types _woman with shark teeth_ and _black eyed ghost_ and _dreams about strange woman meanings?_ He cannot find her.

He draws her, the black pits of her eyes boring into him from his sketchpad. He crumples the drawings, throws them away, fishes them out of the trash and smooths them back onto his desk in the morning, staring at her.

 _What is it that you want?_ he hears her say, grating across his skull. _What is it that you desire more than anything?_

He closes his eyes.

 _Nothing that you can give me_ , he had said. That much he remembers.

Remembers?

His mind scrabbles for purchase. This cannot be a memory, this woman with her gaping mouth full of teeth, her flat black eyes. But even as he denies it a chime rings somewhere deep in his soul, vibrates at a low desperate frequency that makes him taste brine and mud and iron at the back of his throat. He is dangerously close to something he is afraid to look at. He pushes himself up out of bed. He goes for a run, another ghost thudding in his ears, drowning out the rest. _Because of all we've seen, because of all we've said, we are the dead._

The next day he is on the bridge.

He watches the man with the metal arm tear the door off of Nick's car, watches him draw weapon after weapon with inhuman grace. _He's a ghost_ , Nat had said, and at the time he had rolled his eyes and dismissed it, a man is a man and not a ghost, but he moves to fight the man with the metal arm and suddenly the black-eyed woman is in front of him again.

Suddenly

he

remembers.

He opens his eyes in the freezing blue, the cathedral once more, but now he recognizes it. It is his grave. He cannot move, cannot breathe, but he looks at the woman and knows he is alive, somehow, even as his mind yammers in protest. He can feel his body somewhere on the bridge, blow after blow glancing off the man with the metal arm, but his mind is here in the memory of his body in the cool blue silence and it is filled with terror. _I take it back_ , he thinks out of nowhere, but nothing comes from his mouth.

The memory-woman looks at him and says, _What is it that you want? What is it that you desire more than anything?_

His body says, _Nothing that you can give me._

She laughs and laughs and says,  _You doubt a god._

The ice rumbles around her as she holds up a hand. Something glints in the back of her dead black eyes. He thinks, perhaps, that he is dead after all. _Fine,_ he thinks.

 _I want to see him one more time_ , he says.  _You can't help me._ _No one can._

She smiles a wide, jagged smile. _And what would you give me in return, if I were able to grant you this? What is he worth to you?_

He tries to pull himself away, back to the bridge, but the memory holds him like a vise and he can only listen to his body say, _Anything._

_Everything._

The black-eyed woman looks hungry and cruel as she echoes, _Anything._

_Everything._

His heart aches, full of a grief so fresh and raw that it feels like a living thing.

 _Anything_ , she rumbles, the ice cracking around her. _Everything._

The cathedral crumbles around them, the memory releasing him, and his hand catches the mask on the face of the man with the metal arm. The man tumbles away, rolling, sparks flying behind him, and then he climbs to his feet and turns his face toward him. The mask lies on the ground between them. He sees the face of the man with the metal arm and he feels cold fingers slip into his chest, around his heart, and even as his lips form the question, "Bucky?" he can hear her laughing.

_Anything._

The face he has longed to see, has dreamed of, has kept in his soul like a flame, is blank and cold. It is the face of a ghost, a ghost who is a man who is a ghost, and finally he understands. Finally he understands, and the weight of it threatens to crush him.

_Everything._

Those heartbreaking eyes, this face he knows and loves and will love for all of his days, the mouth he finally kissed, just once, in a rainstorm in Italy, opens and speaks and he hears a voice he thought he would never hear again, and it says:

_Anything._

"Who the hell is Bucky?"

_Everything._

**Author's Note:**

> i literally don't know what's wrong with me i'm so sorry. consider this some kind of terrible hell warmup for the eventual actual TSOA au that [mutationalfalsetto](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mutationalfalsetto/pseuds/mutationalfalsetto) and i are going to write. yikes.


End file.
